This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"! Starting in May 2016, many of the reviews for new feature films have been done on a hosted Wordpress site, and this blog now mostly does shorts and older films.

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Thursday, January 30, 2020

“Circular Filmmaking: The Shape of Christopher Nolan’s Films”
, from Studio Binder, explains the devices by which Christopher Nolan’s films
hold an audience’s attention in an unusual way.

History repeats itself.Everything comes back.Ideas
early in my life, associated with my time at William and Mary in 1961, have
come back in retirement.A major
Internet fiasco involving one of my websites when I was substitute teaching
back in 2005 came back – and cost Hillary Clinton the election and led to Trump’s
presidency.I’m not kidding.The same traps catch everyone.There are real ironies in the course of my
life that are absolutely stunning.

So how does Christopher Nolan show this?

One technique is “clues in motifs”.A motif is sometimes a prop, like a spinning
thimble in “Inception” (2014) representing the reality layer of life.The film mentions cats in "The Prestige" (2006).The sea in "Insomnia" (2002).

The short says that Studio Binder production software has
the tools to embed motifs into a script. Apparently this is robust competitionfor Final Draft and Screenwriter.

A second is non-linear stories or layered plots.Nolan believes in writing a script in the
same order the audience will see it.In
my view, the problem with a backstory is usually it is seen through the eyes of
one character.How will the other
characters learn the story except by trusting the first character’s presumed narration?What if the backstory is itself fiction in a story
that the first character wrote?Then I think,
at least in the sci-fi script of mine (“Epiphany”) other devices like telepathy
could work.Another character could be a
good receptor for the telepathy based on a physical attribute of the character
(I call this the “Theta Property” in my own notes, but that is comparable to an
abstract motif). Another possibility is recurrent contacts between other
characters at key events in the past.(I
use baseball games in flashbacks as such a setting, although it sounds like MLB
licensing fees for events – like Bucky Dent’s 1978 home run in Boston, maybe,
are probably expensive). Another obvious
idea is that another character has done “ethical hacking” and can confirm the
backstories in unusual ways (P2P, dark web, access to the cloud backup of
unpublished materials) etc.But a
screenplay needs to make it credible that other characters understand the
backstory and have some “skin in the game” in interacting with the
character.But a strong image about a setting or event (sports,
games, concerts, rehearsals, dance floors,
pride festivals, etc) for encounters can be treated as a “motif” to explain how
other characters have “skin in the game”. Pewdiepie is on to something with his idea of “memes”.

A third idea is “bookends”, using motif’s to show circularity
(like in Insomnia, the lead character is the guy who crossed the line an never
came back).

The short film here shows a curious scene from “Inception”
of a baseball field in a small Kalpana cylinder in space, with all the
curvature.

An interesting observation is the notion that the Universe
is probably four-dimensional space that has no boundaries, like the inside of a
torus or Klein bottle with circularity around more than one dimension.

I see that Don Harmon has videos on "plot circles" and Tyler Mowery has shown them before.

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